Refer McAfee computer security report to Mounties and ITU

August 03, 2011

(Montreal, 3 August 2011) – The Canada Tibet Committee (CTC) is calling on the Canadian government to refer today's report by computer security firm McAfee to the RCMP's Integrated Technological Crime Unit and the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for further investigation.

The McAfee report is a wake-up call to Canada and other countries that 'respectful' discussions with some foreign governments just doesn't cut it when 'state-sponsored' or 'state-tolerated' computer crime is the order of the day.

McAfee's report comes on the heel of numerous investigations that indicate western countries, including Canada, and their citizens are increasingly the target of computer espionage by foreign governments.

The CTC isn't speculating on the identity or location of the alleged cybercriminals identified in the McAfee report, but notes that other investigations have identified IP addresses operating from China as the source of many of these attacks or via computers in other countries that have been hijacked as bots by these same criminals.

“Despite proforma protests to the contrary, the Chinese government is – at the very least – tolerating cybercriminals operating from their soil if not sponsoring them outright,” said CTC executive director Dermod Travis today. “The former makes them complicit in a crime, the latter makes them guilty of it. In either case, it's time that Canada and other countries took firm measures to stop such attacks from occurring.”

The CTC notes that if these attacks were carried out by or from any other country other than China, Canada would haul the ambassador in and it's time to haul in China's ambassador and convey with the utmost clarity that these attacks will cease regardless of whether the targeted computers belong to the Canadian government or ordinary Canadian exercising their charter rights.

The CTC also called on the government to back up its commitment to treat cybercrime as a priority by ensuring that the RCMP Technological Crime Unit has sufficient resources to undertake thorough investigations of cybercrime regardless of its place of origin.

The Canada Tibet Committee is an independent non-governmental organization of Tibetans and non-Tibetans living in Canada, who are concerned about the continuing human rights violations and lack of democratic freedom in Tibet.